Omae wa Mada Gunma adds 275, total 656. One-shot, so Series average: 656. Not that this is much of anything but considering it started at 143 and is now up to 656 after 3 weeks, that means 78% of its sales are in wk2+ which is wild.

Winter update:Idolish7 v6 adds 323 BDs, total 14,900.

Fate/Extra v1 adds 252 BDs, total 3,383.

Past seasons:Pupipo! sells 119 BDs, DVDs do not rank. 75.5% overestimated. One-shot so Series average: 119. This show is from Winter 2014.

OVAs, Movies, Boxsets etc:Long Riders BD Box sells 505.

Nanatsuiro Drops BD Box sells 212. It previously had a 2012 DVD box that sold 425.

How do you measure the success rate for a BD BOX? I knew that it is sold at an even more expensive price rather than normal BD volume release. I asked of this since I wanted to know whether Long Riders is a flop or not. Also, any information for what’s currently selling for latest anime?

“How do you measure the success rate for a BD BOX? I knew that it is sold at an even more expensive price rather than normal BD volume release. I asked of this since I wanted to know whether Long Riders is a flop or not.”

Since you mention Long Riders, I assume you mean re-released box sets (Long Riders was released in single discs first, then this box later), rather than initial release box sets (like Fate/Zero which was a box from the start).

As with most things about “what is success?” it’s hard to say, because you can look at it a number of ways.

You can look at it as a percentage of the original series’ average. Long Riders averaged 1,156 in its first release. 505 for the BD Box is 44% of that, which is fairly good. Of course, it’s 44% of a small number, so it’s still not a lot.

You can further refine this by looking at revenue. While BD boxes of first releases tend to have the same overall MSRP as the equivalent number of single discs, re-releases can vary in price quite a lot, which makes price matter more. Sometimes you’ll see a 1 cour show go for about ¥12000, other times it can be more than double that. Long Riders wasn’t expensive but wasn’t unusually cheap either, at ¥18000. 505 units is about ¥9m. The original release made about ¥50m. So this about 18% of the original’s revenue – less impressive than the 44% when you go by unit count. But probably still not too bad.

Of course, all of these numbers are approximations. Oricon numbers will always be less than what a release really sold, as they don’t capture every single retailer and we usually only get the first 1-2 weeks of data for most releases. Any time revenue numbers are cited for DVD/BD sales, that has to be taken into account. So take this as a rough ballpark, not an exact number.

In any case, BD boxes should mostly be pure profit. It doesn’t cost much to repackage the release and it’s not like they spend much on marketing these things. Whether that profit is “padding gains from the original release” or “trying to make back a little more of the initial losses” depends on how the original release did, of course! But the threshold for a BD box being viable seems to be very low, considering how many of them we see despite so many selling well below 1k.